"For many years I've been saying that from a security point of view there is no big difference between Mac and Windows. It's always been possible to develop Mac malware, but this one was a bit different," said Kaspersky.

"It was asking questions about being installed on the system and, using vulnerabilities, it was able to get to the user mode without any alarms."

Kaspersky went on to say that he expects an increasing number of cyber criminals to target Mac computers as their marketshare grows, and warned Apple that it will have to adopt new tactics to counter them.

"They [Apple] will understand very soon that they have the same problems Microsoft had ten or 12 years ago. They will have to make changes in terms of the cycle of updates and so on and will be forced to invest more into their security audits for the software," he added.

One in five Mac computers are thought to carry Windows malware, while only 2.7% harbor Mac OS X malware.